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Why Do We Need Human Mathematicians Anymore?
This is a guest post by Po-Shen Loh, crossposted from his blog, where an illustrated version appears. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T. Similar logic applies to every industry and every job. And it comes to the conclusion that we won’t have enough people for all the jobs that need to be done. 100% of this post’s prose was written by Po-Shen Loh in a vim terminal, with no AI generation.
13 min · 2,959 words
An Agent’s Breath. The Heart Beats by Itself, Breathing Is a Choice
Today’s agent systems already have a pulse and they have sleep. They do not have breath, and breath is the one place in the body where the will can be watched at work rather than inferred from a result. This is not an argument that machines should be more human.
11 min · 2,562 words
Humans are the only real agents
“Good Enough” Was Good Enough Most of the world runs on software today. Distribution systems that get slippers and earbuds from halfway around the world to a shelf at your local Target, or sophisticated defense systems that protect infrastructure and military assets. Much of that software is actually quite old.
4 min · 851 words
I'm tired of the AI tone. Not AI writing itself. AI is incredibly useful. I've probably used ChatGPT more this week than I'd like to admit. I'm talking about the weird, increasingly recognizable way everything on the internet now sounds like it was written by the same extremely articulate 27-year-old who has never had a bad day. You know the tone. Everything is a wedge. Every idea is not just X, but Y.
4 min · 839 words
A new world airport and its baggage
A longform history of Denver International Airport’s automated baggage system: ambition, failure, and what the wreckage still teaches about complex infrastructure.
32 min · 7,322 words
It’s an egraph that supports well-scoped alpha aware binders. I made a tool that attaches my lifting e-graph ideas arxiv youtube to an s-expression based frontend. - repo https://github.com/philzook58/lambda-microegg - wasm demo https://www.philipzucker.com/lambda-microegg/ .
15 min · 3,440 words
Done, Keys, and a Second Check
An operating-model essay arguing enterprises need ownership of done, keys, escalate/monitor rights, and a second check—not just consumer-style AI agents that complete tasks.
5 min · 1,180 words
ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector
OpenAI's ChatGPT ad measurement pixel sets an __obi cookie that advertisers can echo from their own sites, linking ordinary web browsing back to ChatGPT accounts—and what that means for ad tracking.
5 min · 1,244 words
CleanShot’s bulldozed settings
Marcin Wichary documents how CleanShot’s settings UI was “bulldozed”: dense preferences flattened into a shallower, less legible layout, and what that says about modern app design trade-offs.
5 min · 1,074 words
This is a modern motherfucking website.
Robin Reel's tongue-in-cheek manifesto for building fast, readable, accessible sites without framework bloat—modern CSS and HTML done plainly.
7 min · 1,533 words
A Fractal Kitty rabbit-hole note on minimum L-seams: combinatorial geometry and puzzle-style constraints for tiling and seam placement, with worked intuition for curious math readers.
3 min · 786 words
Why Does AI Code Confidence Increase When Your Risk Should Too?
William Moore on the confidence trap in AI coding tools: fluency peaks on high-stakes auth/payments/migrations because they are common in training data—treat certainty as an inverse risk signal and force failure-mode reasoning.
2 min · 390 words
Bryan Cantrill reflects on Sun Microsystems’ culture and mistakes—what Oxide’s homage tees revive, and which lessons still matter for hardware-software companies.
3 min · 718 words
Arya Mazumdar on the existential panic among mathematicians after AI claimed a Millennium Prize problem, and why the field’s identity is more than automated proofs.
3 min · 684 words
Money. The villagers are tired of bartering. The dairy farmer wants to buy corn, even when he does not have milk to trade, and the corn farmer wants to buy meat, even when the butcher does not want corn. So they decide that special gray stones that they can collect from a nearby riverbed will represent an abstract unit of value, called money. They reason that if everyone uses stones to represent value, then people can transact when they would like, rather than when both parties are willing and able to barter. The villagers have abstracted value. Supply. The villagers picked…
34 min · 7,837 words
XNS argues wallets should only verify, authorize, sign, and broadcast—leaving construction and UX to apps—so independent reverse-checks catch compromised transaction builders.
7 min · 1,697 words
The people who know the most often sound the least certain
Vrash argues AI needs better storytellers, not researchers trained to sound like politicians—using a Dwarkesh conversation with John Schulman, Beren Millidge, and Charlie O'Neill to show how experts hedge while communicators overclaim.
7 min · 1,667 words
Fiscal dominance is here, or is it?
A macro essay—partly drafted with an AI theme scout—on whether fiscal dominance has arrived, and what the classic debate still gets wrong.
9 min · 1,979 words
An unofficial community project revives Amiga Unix (Amix) for 68040/68060 machines and modern accelerators, with a modern toolchain, package manager, and open grimoire of the work.
3 min · 626 words
Claude Code creator Boris Cherny shares an internal note on product judgment under AI: gather information, act with urgency, and treat being wrong quickly as a feature of good leadership—not a failure.
2 min · 372 words